Lost in Shadow Hands-on

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What's it like running around without a body?

By Craig Harris

Poor you: you're all strapped to some strange gallows at the top of an ominous tower, and a mysterious nemesis decides to hack your shadow right off of your body and throw it right off the side. Now your shadow's all alone, and has to work his way back up the tower.

That's right, you play as the shadow in Lost in Shadow. You can only interact with other shadows, be they platforms and ledges, switches, or even enemies. This game, developed by Hudson, is like an old-school throwback to platform puzzlers like Prince of Persia, with new-school visual tricks put in place.

You're a shadow that's cast against the walls of 3D environments, so levels can skew across the floors, walls and ceilings. With the help of a shadow fairy you can manipulate the 3D world to affect your 2D one: objects that cast shadows against your surface can be rotated and flipped to change the shadow itself so you can progress further in your quest to collect tokens in order to move onto the next challenge.

There are also times when you can shift the lightsource's position, either vertically to raise and lower the shadows, or horizontally to shift them left and right.

This Wii game uses the standard remote and nunchuk controls. The analog stick is used to move your character through the side-scrolling environments, with the remote handling pointer duties: by pointing at objects you can use the power of the reticle fairy to trigger the 3D objects in order to change their shadow, or in specific instances it'll be used to slide the light source up and down or left and right.

Early in the adventure you'll acquire a sword to combat the evil shadow monsters. The ones with red eyes can be taken out with hearty thrusts of the sword (a simple tap of the B -- there's no waggle here), but the ones with blue eyes can only be taken down by environmental puzzles and it's up to you to figure out what will take them out. In some puzzles, you can defeat these tougher enemies by triggering traps that would normally harm your character.

The game has a great art style that utilizes some really nice lighting effects to portray the shadow environments. The shadows warp realistically across the 3D environments, and the automatic camera system did a decent job making sure the player's view wasn't obscured by the foreground objects casting the shadows on the walls and floors.

There are more than 50 level challenges in Lost in Shadow. The version of the game at Konami's gamer event was a little early so it lacked the level progression that will be in the final build. We were jumping through levels using a debug menu system.